This summer is going two for two with superhero movies with misleading trailers. First we had Iron Man 3’s trailer, pretending that movie was serious and dark when it was flippant and absurd. Now we have Man of Steel, whose trailer suggests a deep, emotional origin story, but which delivers one of the most heavy-handed, clunky films in recent memory.

The film opens with a scene that already introduces more plot holes in ten minutes than the movie could ever hope to acceptably resolve. The planet Krypton is dying, as a result of the native Kryptonians’ over-use of resources (read into this whatever current ecological parallels you will—this will be this movie’s first and last attempt at any sort of political relevancy). Jor-El (Russel Crow) sends his infant son to earth in a spaceship as his planet crumbles around him. Why the rest of the Kyptonians didn’t also leave in spaceships is anyone’s guess. I guess they all decided to accept their fates?

Baddie General Zod, furious at the way the government of Krypton has stood by and allowed the exploitation of his planet, attempts a coup, but it’s too late—the planet is already doomed. In their infinite wisdom, the leaders of Krypton (knowing Krypton is about to crumble, I might add) sentence Zod to life imprisonment–in a prison that will immediately lose its effectiveness upon the destruction of Krypton, which is about 5 minutes later. With this kind of forward thinking, it’s easy to see how they managed to obliterate the planet. Meanwhile, the infant Kal-El arrives on Earth.

For about ten minutes, the movie dabbles with the sort of soul-searching, identity-seeking origin story that might have made an engaging, psychologically complex Superman film. But it quickly becomes clear the screenwriters lack the chops to pull it off. David S. Goyer obviously lacks confidence in the ability of his dialogue to carry the film, because no conversation is allowed to last longer than a minute before it is interrupted by some sort of CGI-extravaganza—either a bus falling off a bridge, an oil rig explosion, or the tornado from Hell. Because Superman seems to draw trouble like a magnet, and we never really get to see him when he’s not preventing some sort of calamity, we never get the chance to know him as a person—and it is this, more than anything else, that cripples the entire film. What dialogue there is as trite as trite can be, as Superman faces off with the most generic movie bullies ever conceived.

Blowing things up is the only thing Man of Steel does well. As a special-effects reel, or perhaps a silver screen adaptation of the game Sim City—that, is, the part where you gleefully destroy the city—the movie is quite good. As a story, it’s quite simply not.

The last hour of the movie quickly devolves into sequence after sequence of wanton destruction that would make Michael Bay blush and makes a Die Hard flick look as restrained as Masterpiece Theater. And the sad part is that it all could have been avoided. General Zod’s goal is to revive the Kryptonians by colonizing earth—making it uninhabitable for humanity in the process. Seems odd they want to change the atmosphere of Earth to be more like Krypton, when Earth’s atmosphere gives them all superpowers, but there you go. If only Superman had just told him to use Mars instead, all the senseless death could have been avoided. But talking is not how things are resolved in this movie; they’re resolved with punching, and the collapse of skyscrapers. (Maybe I missed a crucial plot point about why it had to be Earth that the Kryptonians were bent on colonizing?)

On the plus side, Man of Steel boasts some of the best visual effects ever, outdoing even such recent hits as the Avengers. It’s a contender for the visual effects Oscar; it won’t be winning any others. It’s score is suitably rousing, though the themes are so bombastic and so frequently recycled that it starts to wear out its welcome rather fast. When compared with the minus side, the plus side seems rather pitiful.

At one point in the film, Jor-El asks “What if a child dreamed of becoming something other than what society had intended? What if a child aspired to something greater?” I might ask the movie the same question. Explosion-filled superhero summer blockbusters are dime a dozen these days. I was hoping this movie would, like the Dark Knight, aspire to something greater. If it’s a choice between the tongue-in-cheek, self-aware comedy of the Marvel films or the plodding seriousness of this one, I’ll take another Iron Man 3 any day of the week.

Up until I saw Life of Pi, Skyfall was the most gorgeous film I had seen this year. But now that I have seen Life of Pi, Skyfall has been dethroned.

I hung back from this movie for quite a while. The trailer I had seen put me in mind of a CGI-laden, 3-D, special effects extravaganza that would subsume the heart of the original story. CGI animals? Well, I’d seen that before, in Narnia, and it looked unrealistic then; I was sure there was no way they could pull it off now, a mere few years later.

I won’t say that the CGI animals of Life of Pi never look unrealistic, because they do. CGI is at its best when it’s surreal landscapes; it’s not quite so believable when dealing with living, moving creatures. But if one of the worst things that can be said about Life of Pi is that its CGI zebra looks fake, then it’s safe to say that Life of Pi is a good movie.

The story is a simple one—a boy finds himself adrift on a raft with a couple of animals, which are quickly dispatched, leaving him alone with a hungry, dangerous tiger. The movie’s real focus, though, isn’t on survival or even the curious bond between boy and tiger, but rather on an exploration of what drives men to believe in God. In case you lose sight of that central God theme, don’t worry; the movie will remind you about it every ten minutes or so.

At the end of Life of Pi, I was left a little confused and nonplussed—what did it all mean? Apparently this was only because I had failed to understand the penultimate line of dialogue in the film; after reading it on IMDB, my appreciation for this movie rose several notches. One line of dialogue can make the difference between a good film and a great one. It’s a movie about the forces that compel humankind to seek out spirituality, about the power of storytelling and the line between truth and fiction.

Life of Pi is a film that is at turns charming, beautiful, and terrifying. It is an effects film unlike any other, a film that seeks more than anything to inspire its audience with a sense of wonder and awe. And it works, thanks to a series of compelling visuals and its themes which, while at times overbearing, add a sense of cohesion to Pi´s disjointed narrative. Scenes that seemed overdone in the trailer work in the actual film—the shipwreck scene is truly terrifying, a scene in which a glowing whale leaps from the ocean is mesmerizing and frightening all at once, and a second storm manages to be almost as frightening as the first. The only real misstep is a scene involving a horde of flying fish leaping across the boat. The scene feels both contrived and cartoonish; contrived that food would appear so plentifully just at the moment when Pi was facing down a hungry tiger, and cartoonish because the the CGI fish look absurd. I imagine this was a scene designed to take full use of Life of Pi’s 3D effects, but never has a scene designed mainly to show off 3D ever been anything but awkward in 2D.

It’s hard to talk about what makes Life of Pi great or otherwise without talking about its ending, since much of the film’s meaning only becomes apparent in the last twenty minutes. I won’t spoil the movie, but suffice it to say that an intriguing plot development in the third act is perhaps not given the screentime or exploration it deserves. That might be my greatest criticism of Life of Pi–that its ending is a bit too rushed to make the full impact it should. On the whole, though, Life of Pi is a movie with stunning visuals (all the more impressive considering the subject matter is a boy and a tiger adrift on a single small lifeboat) and a lot of heart, and that’s enough to propel it to a chance at the Oscars, where it just might deserve to win.

I know what people have said about this movie. It’s the best of the prequels. It makes up for Episodes I and II. It’s better thanReturn of the Jedi, and almost as good as the original Star WArs film.

To which I say: what? Are you ***ing kidding me?

Star Wars Episode III is dark, yes, violent, yes, and epic, yes. And sometimes darkness, epicness, and violence can be mistaken for quality. I know I made that mistake when I first saw the movie. Up there, on the big screen, in all its CGI-filed glory, with Sorround Sound blasting at you and John Silliams’ weeping orchestral score being pumped at youthrough sorround-sound speakers, it’s hard not to feel a little impressed.

But once you look past the surface, Revenge of the Sith is really not very good at all. The reasons it is not very good are so numerous and complex that I have no choice but to enumerate all of them in an epic review.

To be fair, Revenge of the Sith isn’t a terrible movie, just a horribly disappointing one. It might be better than the other prequels, in the same way that X:Men, the Last Stand is better than X:Men Origins Wolverine. It’s certainly not the worst of the prequels (cough, Attack of the Clones, cough). But it sin no way comparable to the original trilogy. Here’s why.

1. The Special Effects

In one scene on the DVD audio-commentary, George Lucas explains how he is really proud of one scene, because nothing in it except for the emperor (Ian McDiarmid) is real. Everything else in the scene, including the clone trooper soldiers accompanying the emperor, is CGI.

This pretty much sums up what is wrong with the entire movie.

CGI looks fake. The only reason people use it in movies is because it is the simplest and cheapest way to do things that otherwise would be impossible. Sometimes it is the only way. Most sane directors (directors who aren’t Michael Bay, or George Lucas) are aware of the fact that generally actual real props and sets look more realistic than stuff that is generated on a computer screen. What a surprise.

But for some reason, George Lucas not only uses CG when there are other ways of doing an effect, he uses CGI even when this other ways are easier and make more sense. Why make a CGI clone trooper soldier when you could just get a guy and put him in a costume? Why make a CGI jungle battle when you could just go and shoot in a jungle? George Lucas’ obsession with CGI isn’t enough to ruin the movie on its own, but it does lend every scene an extra dimension of fakeness that prevents you from becoming immersed in the world. The fight scenes are so over-crowded with spaceships, dragons (wait, what? Dragons fighting spaceships? Are you serious?) that it’s hard to even tell who is fighting who, what weird, improbably designed vehicle is on what side, or who is winning. Another problem with the CGI is that it enables George Lucas to stuff as many insultingly ridiculous objects into every battle. Tanks shaped like snails? WHY? Spaceships shaped like vultures? Again, WHY? The most insulting of all has to be the eye-rollingly named buzz droids, robots that the creators of this movie designed to look like flies apparently just because they could. Who designed this army of evil, anyway? P. T. Barnum? Dora the Explorer?

2. The acting/dialogue.

A fake-ass looking world wouldn’t be so disastrous if there were something besides the special effects to keep people engaged. Unfortunately, as we are about to see, the story feels about as real as the background it’s set in. By which I mean not at all.

You would think after watching Episode II and seeing that he’d written such bland, unbelievable, Shakespeare-sounding bullshit lines as “I wish I could wish away my feelings, but I can’t,” and “I am haunted by the kiss you should never have given me. My heart is beating, hoping that that kiss will not become a scar,” George Lucas would have realized that whatever talent he’d had for screenwriting had joined the force a long time ago and hire someone else to write the screenplay for his one last chance at redemption. Maybe Quentin Tarantino? I don’t know, someone.

But no, instead we get to listen to more lines that sound as though they were stolen off the insides of Hallmark love cards and from from second-grade textbooks on the American Revolution.

A few precious gems include:

“I sense a plot to destroy the Jedi.”

“Anakin, you’re breaking my heart. Going down a path I can’t follow.”

“Have faith, my love. Things will soon be set right.”

“This war represents a failure to listen.”

“I sense a plot to destroy the Jedi.”

“My allegiance is to the Republic. To DE-MO-CRA-CY!”

“I sense a plot to destroy the Jedi.”

Speaking of plots…

3. The plot.

The plot not only is retarded, it actually directly contradicts lots of things in the original three movies. You know you fail at making a prequel when you can’t even get it to match up with the original movies.

The plot revolves around Anakin Skywalker, who was already a selfish, arrogant, agsty little shit, turning genuinely evil. This transformation might have been more tragic and moving if Anakin Skywalker had actually been a likable character at some point, but never mind.

Anyway, the reason he turns evil is because he thinks the dark lord of evil can save her. You see, he had a dream. Yes a ****ing dream. About her dying in childbirth.

Wait. You’re telling me that the same people responsible for building a giant looting city with spaceships that can travel at the speed of light and talking gay robots, the same people who can make people robot arms and save a man with 3rd degree burns all over his body don’t know how to save women from dying in childbirth? Try a C-Section, you medieval dumb****s.

All right, whatever. So anyway, Anakin turns evil as we all know. What is the first thing he does? Attempt to start learning the dark magic that can save his pregnant wife, who is due to deliver in a matter of days? Hell no. He goes and kills some kids, ecause the surest way to save a pregnant woman’s life is by killing children. Oh, I’m sorry. Younglings.

Then he goes and kills a bunch of CGI people with a CGI sword. One you realize that it’s these are the assholes who built the buzz droids, snail tanks, vulture ships, and most of the other fake-ass looking shit in this movie, so it really is gratifying to see them get chopped into pieces by a super-heated plasma sword.

For some reason, this killing spree actually fails to save his wife, who does die in childbirth. It turns out that the medical reason given for her death is a broken heart. Wait, really? Apparently, George Lucas thinks he can get away with shoving Shakespeare crap like this into a movie containing the words ‘buzz droids.’ Sadly, he is mistaken.

Wait. She dies in childbirth? Something seems fishy…oh, yeah, that one scene in Return of the Jedi when Leia describes her mother. Beautiful…but sad. I guess you could call screaming in agony as you give birth to twins and then expiring a few seconds later…sad. It’s not quite the word I would have chosen, but it’s in the general ballpark of negative emotions. What I don’t understand is how a 5 second-year-old baby is capable of remembering this at all. Either Leia’s got some sort of super Jedi-memory, or George Lucas doesn’t actually know what happened in his own movies.

4. General Grievous

Is there any way to somehow make a four-armed, cyborg alien general not cool? If you thought the answer was no, then boy are you in for a surprise.

First of all, the name. General Greivous? Grevious? As in, say, a grievous injury, or a grievous defeat, or a grievous wound? Oh, damn George. That’s subtle.

I suppose I shouldn’t have expected anything else from a man responsible for Count Dooku (say it out loud), Lord Tyrannus (Cause he’s tyrannical? Or something?), and Darth Maul (get it? Like, how animals maul you? It’s a pun, see.)

It turns out the name is the least of General Grievous’ problems. He staggers around each scene coughing like a guy who can’t quit smoking. Coughing? He’s a freaking robot who doesn’t have lungs, a mouth, or a nose. He does have a heart, though, as you can see when the armor gets ripped off his chest. Never mind the fact that he has no veins. George Lucas really doesn’t know how the circulatory system works, does he? Either this whole heart-inside-the-machine thing is a really bad metaphor or General Grievous is the dumbest idea since colored ketchup.

5. The fight scnes

Ok, the plot sucks, but this is an action movie. At least there are gonna be some pretty badass fights, am I right?

No, no you are not.

Half of the fights consist of fake-lloking CGI robots shooting at fake-looking CGI clone-troopers. They’re fighting a war, you see, because of..stuff? I guess it’s because the people who are building the robots are evil. I mean, if they weren’t evil, they wouldn’t be led by a giant evil-looking dude called General Grievous, right?

Anyway, the only fight anyone cares about is the epic, half-an-hour long climactic duel at the end between the two main characters. Which is so long, boring, and unrealistic it defies description.

If you’ve ever been near anything hot in your entire life, you probably are aware of the fact that heat radiates out from its source the same way that poorly animated clone wars TV show spinoffs radiate out of Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones. This means that it is possible to feel heat/get burned without actually touching the source of the heat.If you know anything about lava, you are aware that it is very ****ing hot. Apparently George Lucas’ only experience with lava comes from playing video games, in which you can only die if you actually fall in. So we get twelve minutes of two people standing literally three feet above an entire planet of lava and not so much as breaking a sweat. If this isn’t enough to remind you you’re actually watching two people standing in the middle of a green room and swinging at each other with sticks, I don’t know what is.

So, what is good about it?

Well, the music is great. And there’s a few good parts, like when Samuel L Jackson fights a dude who can shoot lightning out of his hands. Oh, and that part where all the Jedi got shot is kind of sad. But only if you’ve read all the comic books/novelizations/whatever and know that the weird-looking guy with an orange head and a mask over his face is actually Plo Koon(tm). Apart from that, there is only the realization that no matter how disappointing this movie is, it could have been worse. It could have been this.

Why, you might ask, am I reviewing Avatar in this segment? It’s not really sci-fi horror. True enough. And yet, in its own way, Avatar is more terrifying than Sunshine, the Thing, and 28 Days Later rolled onto one. It is terrifying that such a mediocre movie could go on to be nominated for best picture and receive a score of 83 on Rotten Tomatoes (the original score, before the critics got over the hype and began to finally come to their senses, was much higher).

There is nothing imaginative about this movie. The plot needs no synopsis, because quite simply it is Dances With Wolves/The Last Samurai/Pocahontas, except in space, which I guess means it’s different. The culture of the blue cat people (Na’vi, they’re called) is undeveloped and simplistic. Their society is portrayed as so wonderfully utopian (in stark contrast to the militaristic, greedy humans) that it’s almost insulting. It’s as if James Cameron felt we couldn’t have rooted for the Na’vi unless they were perfect in every way–culturally, spiritually, physically, you name it. Yet the Na’vi are so perfect that they’re annoyingly unrealistic. As you look at their sleek, sexy blue bodies (imagine how the interspecies romance would have played out had the aliens of Pandora not looked conveniently like sexed-up humans with USB devices in their hair and cute tails), their gorgeous big Disney eyes, and their painfully adorable little cat noses, you can’t help but feel like a puppet, with James Cameron pulling on the emotional strings. He’s determined to make you love his Na’vi, damn it, no matter what it takes.

The unoriginal plot might not have been such problem had the story of Avatar been well told. After all, a lot of Shakespeare plays are pretty cliche, too. But this writing ain’t nothing like Shakespeare.

Apart from the visual effects, which are undeniably outstanding on a technical level (though lacking the stylistic flair of movies like Sunshine or even 300), Avatar is an exercise in mediocrity. Mediocre writing, mediocre acting, you name it. In every way that counts, Avatar is painfully average.

Sam Worthington does an admirably bland job portraying the flat and unmemorable Jake Sully, our protagonist, whose one defining characteristic seems to be a mild form of mental retardation–after being told by a scary, scar-faced sergeant that everything on Pandora wants to kill you, he proceeds to run around the place like a giddy toddler, touching every plant he can get his grubby blue avatar fingers on. Zoe Saldana is predictable as Neytiri, whose character is exactly what you’d expect–the obligatory tree-loving, attractive, proud and confident native chick. The villains are so over-the-top and lacking in nuance that they’re actually amusing at times. And even Sigourney Weaver is unable to bring anything new to her character, who is your usual in-your-face, smartass (read: bitchy) authority figure.

The story plods along at a surprisingly slow pace, and Avatar really feels like the three hour movie it is. It takes more than two hours for the promised action scenes to finally arrive, which wouldn’t be a problem, if the dialogue that filled those two hours wasn’t so ploddingly tedious.

At least Avatar is trying. You can tell it honestly wants to be a good movie. It wants to deliver a meaningful message in an engaging way, it just doesn’t quite now how to do this. It’s like James Cameron is a little kid who managed to scribble a picture out of crayons and is proudly showing it off, unaware that it’s not the next Mona Lisa. You almost want to give the guy a hug–until you remember this crayon scribble earned him billions of dollars. Despite its financial success, though, Avatar is no Transformers–it’s not just a blockbuster shelled out to make a few quick bucks. It’s plain that James Cameron put a lot of heart into this film, and it’s a shame that his hubris led him to think he was capable of writing the screenplay when he probably should have hired someone better to do the job.

When people (especially critics, who ought to know better) say that, despite its plot, Avatar is a good movie because of its visual splendor, I fear for the future of the movie industry. As Red Letter Media brilliantly says, if Avatar was a theme park ride, I probably wouldn’t complain so much about the story. But the sad fact is, Avatar is not a ride. It’s a movie. A feature film. And the two most important parts of a movie are, generally speaking:

1. the characters

2. the story

It’s these aspects that enable your movie to form an emotional connection with the audience. All the gunships and dragon-things and alien horses in the world can’t make me care, but give me a strong character and a story worthy of that character, and I’ll sit through your three-hour extravaganza and beg for more when it’s over.

As for Avatar, I found myself, especially towards the end, becoming bored. Bored with the endless blather about the goddess Eywa, bored by the idiocy of listening to characters expound on the necessity of obtaining unobtainium (ah, James Cameron, your subtle irony gets me), bored by the forced love story and the sheer predictability of it all.

I will be kicking off my brief ode to sci-fi/horror with a look at the Thing, a 1982 film by Jonh Carpenter. According to Cracked.com “Its sole purpose for being made seems to be to melt your face off with excessive amounts of awesomeness.” Can’t say I really disagree with that assessment.

For some reason, it seism to be a lot less well-known than it’s big brother, Alien, despite being, in many ways, the better movie. Sure, Alien has a few nice jump scares and a creepy-looking snarly monster, but the Thing has it beat because its monster looks even creepier, and because its premise is a lot more intriguing and devilishly fun than that of your typical monster slasher flick.

See, the monster in the Thing is the most awesome alien shapeshifter to ever grace the silver screen. Every part of it is alive. If you cut off its head, that head will literally grow spider legs and try to run away. If it manages to get its hands (or tentacles or whatever) on you, not only will it kill you, it will absorb your DNA and make an exact copy of you–albeit a copy that can transform into a slimy alien monster at any time. The Thing’s goal is to try to take over every member of the Antarctic research camp where the movie is set camp so that it can eventually escape Antarctica and infect/consume the entire world.

So what you are left with is a camp full of scientists, led by the well-bearded Kurt Russell, who don’t know which of their friends is a human, and which an alien. If this sounds like the setup for an awesome role-playing game, that’s because it is.

I’m honestly surprised this move didn’t spawn a franchise–with such a great, recyclable premise, it seemed like Hollywood would jump at the chance to keep milking the Thing until they ran out of buckets. They could have had a new one every couple of years. New characters, new setting, same combination of paranoia and creepy looking special effects. I guess it figures that the one horror movie that actually could have used spin-offs/sequels doesn’t get them while instead we’re treated to Saw 6,000. Apparently they’re actually getting around to making a new ‘Thing’ movie 30 years later, but it’s going to be a prequel, which really makes me what to bang my head against the wall because half the fun of the Thing is not knowing how the mystery will end. Guessing who is human and who a monster. Wondering which side will win. Taking bets with your friends about who will live and who will get incinerated (because the only way to kill the Thing for sure is with a flamethrower. Oddly enough, these badass researchers happen to have a big stock of flamethrowers just lying around. Hey, it is cold down there.)

The greatest irony is that the monster (created with a combination of stop-motion, models, and make-up) like at least 100 times better than the CGI beasties of modern horror flicks like I am Legend. The Thing has to be one of the grossest looking monsters ever conceived. Some of the stuff in this movie is so bizarre, so hands-down weird, that it turns your stomach. A creature with a half-formed dog’s head growing out of its neck? A guy with a head that opens like a flower? A severed head pulling itself along the floor by its tongue before sprouting hairy tarantula legs and scuttling off to hide? Who thinks of that stuff?

Seriously, who?

The Thing’s other strength lies in its characters. They are not the bumbling idiots typical of many slasher films (people who tend to trip and fall a lot whenever something is chasing them). They are scared but determined men who are willing to give up their lives if it means taking the monster down with them. They act like people who are scared, but not like people who are mentally challenged. This makes it easy to root for them to win, as well as gut-wrenching when some of them are horribly killed off.

Honestly, the Thing itself only shows up in a few key scenes. This makes it all the more exciting and memorable when it does appear, in all its slimy glory, and it also means that the movie gets to focus a lot on the tensions between the characters. As suspicion consumes the camp, friend begins to turn on friend, and no one is sure who to trust. At one point, even Kurt Russell is suspected of being the Thing, and the other members of the team try to ice him (quite literally. They leave him outside to freeze to death.) And although our first reaction is ‘come on, not Russell, he’s the main character’, there’s that small voice in the back of our heads that wonders if it could be true. Well, ok, a very small voice.

The climax strays a little too far in the direction of your typical B-grade monster movie. There’s a lot of special effects on display, and somehow it still managed to be less frightening and exciting than a lot of the scenes that went before it. But the film redeems itself by boasting one of the most perfect endings ever. I won’t spoil it, but suffice it to say that if you watch it with friends, it will leave you with a lot to talk about.